This is why we can't have nice things

Computer errors caused the government to hand out duplicate loans to thousands of borrowers under the Trump administration’s program to rescue businesses from the economic ravages of the coronavirus pandemic.

While the Paycheck Protection Program has been subject to fraud, the revelations contained in a new report by the inspector general of the Small Business Administration speak instead to a faulty — and costly — implementation.

Aging federal technology may have hampered the SBA’s inability to track and cross-reference loans. Two years ago, the Government Accountability Office found that information systems across the federal government were badly outdated. Some computer hardware at the SBA was a decade old, that investigation found.

  Yahoo

That may not sound like a lot, but in the computer program world, it might as well be centuries.

The error persisted for about 14 hours before SBA officials spotted and fixed the relevant code. Because the SBA was facing a massive backlog of applications, officials there decided not to go back and correct whatever duplicate loan applications were processed during that 14-hour period.

[...]

In all, SBA Inspector General Mike Ware found, banks authorized to issue PPP loans “made more than one PPP disbursement to 4,260 borrowers, which totaled about $692 million and involved 8,731 PPP loans.”

Businesses were allowed to apply for PPP loans with several banks; it was the SBA’s duty to make sure that if a borrower had an application before one bank, applications before any other banks were withdrawn. If the SBA did not alert a bank that one of its prospective borrowers had other outstanding applications, that borrower would have no barrier to securing several loans.

God forbid borrowers should police themselves.

One borrower received 17 loans from the federal government, for a total of $1.3 million. It was not clear who that 17-loan recipient was or how the borrower managed to secure so many loans when other prospective borrowers struggled to win a single award through the business-rescue program.

An official with the SBA inspector general’s office declined to divulge information about that borrower, or whether the borrower was being investigated by the agency. That official did confirm to Yahoo News that the 17 loans were not separate franchises of a large corporate chain, in which case the loans would have adhered to the program’s guidelines.

Which was also a contentious point in the PPP program, since large chains, presumably, would be able to draw upon their own finances to get through the pandemic. 

Also, 17 separate loans in a 14-hour period? Sounds like something other than a computer code breakdown.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.